Table Of ContentFirst published by Verso 2012
© Slavoj Žižek
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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eISBN‐13: 978‐1‐84467‐902‐7
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Zizek, Slavoj.
Less than nothing : Hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism
by Slavoj Zizek.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978‐1‐84467‐897‐6 ‐‐ ISBN 978‐1‐84467‐889‐1 (ebook)
1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770‐1831. I. Title.
B2948.Z55 2012
193‐‐dc23
2011050465
Typeset in Minion Pro by MJ Gavan, Cornwall, UK
Printed by in the US by Maple Vail
To Alenka and Mladen—because die Partei hat immer Recht.
Contents
Introduction: Eppur Si Muove
PART I. THE DRINK BEFORE
1 “Vacillating the Semblances”
What cannot be said must be shown
Idea’s appearing
From fictions to semblances
Dialectical gymnastics? No, thanks!
From the One to den
“Nothing exists”
Gorgias, not Plato, was the arch‐Stalinist!
2 “Where There Is Nothing, Read That I Love You”
A Christian Tragedy?
The big Other
The death of God
The atheist wager
“Do not compromise your desire”
Lacan against Buddhism
3 Fichte’s Choice
From Fichte’s Ich to Hegel’s Subject
The Fichtean wager
Anstoss and Tat‐Handlung
Division and limitation
The finite Absolute
The posited presupposition
The Fichtean bone in the throat
The first modern theology
PART II. THE THING ITSELF: HEGEL
4 Is It Still Possible to Be a Hegelian Today?
Hegel versus Nietzsche
Struggle and reconciliation
A story to tell
Changing the destiny
The owl of Minerva
Potentiality versus virtuality
The Hegelian circle of circles
Interlude 1: Marx as a Reader of Hegel, Hegel as a Reader of Marx
5 Parataxis: Figures of the Dialectical Process
In praise of Understanding
Phenomena, noumena, and the limit
The differend
Negation of the negation
Form and content
Negation without a filling
Interlude 2: Cogito in the History of Madness
6 “Not Only as Substance, but Also as Subject”
Concrete universality
Hegel, Spinoza … and Hitchcock
The Hegelian Subject
Absolute Knowing
The Idea’s constipation?
The animal that I am
Interlude 3: King, Rabble, War … and Sex
7 The Limits of Hegel
A List
Necessity as self‐sublated contingency
Varieties of self‐relating negation
The formal aspect
Aufhebung and repetition
From repetition to drive
PART III. THE THING ITSELF: LACAN
8 Lacan as a Reader of Hegel
The Cunning of Reason
The Lacanian prosopopoeia
Lacan, Marx, Heidegger
The “magical force” of reversal
Reflection and supposition
Beyond intersubjectivity
Drive versus Will
The unconscious of self‐consciousness
Interlude 4: Borrowing from the Future, Changing the Past
9 Suture and Pure Difference
From differentiality to the phallic signifier
From the phallic signifier to objet a
Sibelius’s silence
The pure difference
Interlude 5: Correlationism and Its Discontents
10 Objects, Objects Everywhere
Subtraction, protraction, obstruction … destruction
The objet a between form and content
Voice and gaze
The grandmother’s voice
The Master and its specter
The two sides of fantasy
Image and gaze
Presence
“The picture is in my eye, but me, I am in the picture”
Leave the screen empty!
Interlude 6: Cognitivism and the Loop of Self‐Positing
11 The Non‐All, or, the Ontology of Sexual Difference
Sexual difference in the disenchanted universe
The real of sexual difference
Formulae of sexuation: the All with an exception
Formulae of sexuation: the non‐All
The antinomies of sexual difference
Why Lacan is not a nominalist
Negation of the negation: Lacan versus Hegel?
“There is a non‐relationship”
PART IV. THE CIGARETTE AFTER
12 The Foursome of Terror, Anxiety, Courage … and Enthusiasm
Being/World/Event
Truth, inconsistency, and the symptomal point
There is no human animal
Badiou against Levinas
From terror to enthusiasm
Badiou and antiphilosophy
13 The Foursome of Struggle, Historicity, Will … and Gelassenheit
Why Lacan is not a Heideggerian
Hegel versus Heidegger
The torture‐house of language
An alternative Heidegger
From will to drive
The non‐historical core of historicity
From Gelassenheit to class struggle
14 The Ontology of Quantum Physics
The ontological problem
Knowledge in the Real
Agential realism
The two vacuums
Y’a de den
Conclusion: The Political Suspension of the Ethical
Introduction: Eppur Si Muove
There are two opposed types of stupidity. The first is the (occasionally)
hyper‐intelligent subject who just doesn’t “get it,” who understands a situation logically,
but simply misses its hidden contextual rules. For example, when I first visited New York, a
waiter at a café asked me: “How was your day?” Mistaking the phrase for a genuine
question, I answered him truthfully (“I am dead tired, jet‐lagged, stressed out …”), and he
looked at me as if I were a complete idiot … and he was right: this kind of stupidity is
precisely that of an idiot. Alan Turing was an exemplary idiot: a man of extraordinary
intelligence, but a proto‐psychotic unable to process implicit contextual rules. In literature,
one cannot avoid recalling Jaroslav Hašek’s good soldier Švejk, who, when he saw soldiers
shooting from their trenches at the enemy soldiers, ran into no‐man’s land and started to
shout: “Stop shooting, there are people on the other side!” The arch‐model of this idiocy is,
however, the naïve child from Andersen’s tale who publicly exclaims that the emperor is
naked—thereby missing the point that, as Alphonse Allais put it, we are all naked beneath
our clothes.
The second and opposite figure of stupidity is that of the moron: the stupidity of
those who fully identify with common sense, who fully stand for the “big Other” of
appearances. In the long series of figures beginning with the Chorus in Greek
tragedy—which plays the role of canned laughter or crying, always ready to comment on
the action with some common wisdom—one should mention at least the “stupid”
common‐sense partners of the great detectives: Sherlock Holmes’s Watson, Hercule
Poirot’s Hastings … These figures are there not only to serve as a contrast to and thus make
more visible the detective’s grandeur; they are indispensable for the detective’s work. In
one of the novels, Poirot explains to Hastings his role: immersed in his common sense,
Hastings reacts to the crime scene the way the murderer who wanted to erase the traces of
his act expected the public to react, and it is only in this way, by including in his analysis the
expected reaction of the common‐sense “big Other,” that the detective can solve the crime.
But does this opposition cover the entire field? Where, for instance, are we to put
Franz Kafka, whose greatness resides (among other things) in his unique ability to present
idiocy as something entirely normal and conventional? (Recall the extravagantly “idiotic”
reasoning in the long debate between the priest and Josef K. which follows the parable
“Before the Law.”) For this third position, we need look no further than the Wikipedia entry
for “imbecile”: “Imbecile is a term for moderate to severe mental retardation, as well as for
a type of criminal. It arises from the Latin word imbecillus, meaning weak, or weak‐minded.
‘Imbecile’ was once applied to people with an IQ of 26–50, between ‘moron’ (IQ of 51–70)
and ‘idiot’ (IQ 0–25).” So it is not too bad: beneath a moron, but ahead of an idiot—the
situation is catastrophic, but not serious, as (who else?) an Austrian imbecile would have
put it. Problems begin with the question: where does the root “becile” preceded by the
negation (“im‐”) come from? Although the origins are murky, it is probably derived from
the Latin baculum (stick, walking stick, staff), so an “imbecile” is someone walking around
without the help of a stick. One can bring some clarity and logic into the issue if one
conceives of the stick on which we all, as speaking beings, have to lean, as language, the
symbolic order, that is, what Lacan calls the “big Other.” In this case, the tripartite
idiot‐imbecile‐moron makes sense: the idiot is simply alone, outside the big Other, the
moron is within it (dwelling in language in a stupid way), while the imbecile is in between
the two—aware of the need for the big Other, but not relying on it, distrusting it, something
like the way the Slovene punk group Laibach defined their relationship towards God (and
referring to the words on a dollar bill “In God we trust”): “Like Americans, we believe in
God, but unlike Americans, we don’t trust him.” In Lacanese, an imbecile is aware that the
big Other does not exist, that it is inconsistent, “barred.” So if, measured by the IQ scale, the
moron appears brighter than the imbecile, he is too bright for his own good (as reactionary
morons, but not imbeciles, like to say about intellectuals). Among the philosophers, the late
Wittgenstein is an imbecile par excellence, obsessively dealing with variations of the
question of the big Other: is there an agency which guarantees the consistency of our
speech? Can we reach certainty about the rules of our speech?
Does not Lacan aim at the same position of the (im)becile when he concludes his
“Vers un signifiant nouveau” with: “I am only relatively stupid—that is to say, I am as
stupid as all people—perhaps because I got a little bit enlightened”?1 One should read this
relativization of stupidity—“not totally stupid”—in the strict sense of non‐All: the point is
not that Lacan has some specific insights which make him not entirely stupid. There is
nothing in Lacan which is not stupid, no exception to stupidity, so that what makes him not
totally stupid is only the very inconsistency of his stupidity. The name of this stupidity in
which all people participate is, of course, the big Other. In a conversation with Edgar Snow
in the early 1970s, Mao Zedong characterized himself as a hairless monk with an umbrella.
Holding an umbrella hints at the separation from heaven, and, in Chinese, the character for
“hair” also designates law and heaven, so that what Mao is saying is that—in Lacanese—he
is subtracted from the dimension of the big Other, the heavenly order which regulates the
normal run of things. What makes this self‐designation paradoxical is that Mao still
designates himself as a monk (a monk is usually perceived as someone who, precisely,
dedicates his life to heaven)—so how can one be a monk subtracted from heaven? This
“imbecility” is the core of the subjective position of a radical revolutionary (and of the
analyst).
The present book is thus neither The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Hegel, nor is it yet
another university textbook on Hegel (which would be for morons, of course); it is
something like The Imbecile’s Guide to Hegel—Hegel for those whose IQ is somewhere close
to their bodily temperature (in Celsius), as the insult goes. But only something like it: the
problem with “imbeciles” is that none of us, as ordinary speakers, knows what the “im”
negates: we know what “imbecile” means, but we don’t know what “becile” is—we simply
suspect that it must somehow be the opposite of “imbecile.”2 But what if, here too, persists
the mysterious tendency for antonyms (such as heimlich and unheimlich—about which
Freud wrote a famous short text) to mean the same thing? What if “becile” is the same as
“imbecile,” only with an additional twist? In our daily use, “becile” does not stand on its
own, it functions as a negation of “imbecile,” so that, insofar as “imbecile” already is a
negation of a kind, “becile” must be a negation of negation—but, and this is crucial, this
double negation does not bring us back to some primordial positivity. If an “imbecile” is
one who lacks a substantial basis in the big Other, a “becile” redoubles the lack, transposing
it into the Other itself. The becile is a not‐imbecile, aware that if he is an imbecile, God
himself also has to be one.
So what does a becile know that idiots and morons don’t? The legend has it that, in
1633, Galileo Galilei muttered, “Eppur si muove” (“And yet it moves”), after recanting before
the Inquisition his theory that the Earth moves around the Sun: he was not tortured, it was
